A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
We are pleased to announce the GA release of enhanced patching capabilities for SQL Server on Azure VMs using Azure Update Manager. When you register your SQL Server on Azure VM with the SQL IaaS Agent extension, you unlock a number of feature benefits, including patch management at scale with Azure Update Manager.
Read on to see what this does, how you can set it up, and how you can migrate from the SQL Server IaaS agent extension’s automated patching service.
Comments closedVlad Drumea is a trusting fellow:
This post covers a few ways to fix the SSL certificate error 1416F086 returned by sqlcmd on Linux when connecting to SQL Server.
If you’re looking for ways to fix the Windows equivalent of this error when using dbatools, check out this blog post.
It’s interesting how much controversy we’re seeing around tools like sqlcmd and (especially) SQL Server Management Studio defaulting to mandatory encryption. Having signed and valid certificates is a critical part of validating that this SQL Server is actually the one you think it is, and no intermediary attacker has swapped the certificate out with a phony one that allows the attacker to spy on your interactions.
I can understand people who are just messing around with SQL Server locally to experience pain on this, but the sheer number of actual companies—including companies using Central Management Servers, which implies having multiple SQL Server instances—with garbage-tier self-signed certificates is discouragingly high.
By the way, I’m aiming none of my rant at Vlad or this post. It’s just top-of-mind and this was as good a vehicle for rant delivery as I could find.
Comments closedChris Webb gives us an update on internal join types and query folding in Power Query:
There are a couple of nice new features to do with table joins (or merges as they are known in M) and query folding in Power Query in the April release of Power BI Desktop that I want to highlight.
Read on for more information about anti-joins, semi-joins, and the ?? coalesce operator.
Comments closedChristian Lorentzen makes a swap:
With its newest release 1.1.0, the Python package model-diagnostics got the concept of a plotting backend. Before this release, all plots were constructed with matplotlib. This is still the default. But additionally, the user can now select plotly, if it is installed.
Click through to see how it works.
Comments closedSteven Sanderson performs a test:
In the world of statistics and data analysis, understanding and accurately estimating the parameters of probability distributions is crucial. One such distribution is the chi-square distribution, often encountered in various statistical analyses. In this blog post, we’ll dive into how we can estimate the degrees of freedom (“df”) and the non-centrality parameter (“ncp”) of a chi-square distribution using R programming language.
Read on to learn more about the process of estimation while I grumble something about Bayesian analysis being better.
Comments closedVlad Drumea blames the intern:
This is pretty useful if you’ve inherited a SQL Server instance running on Linux, but the last person™ didn’t bother saving the sa password in your teams password manager vault.
Or, if you’re like me, and spin up test instances with random passwords for sa that you don’t bother saving anywhere.
Click through to see where you can find out how to reset the password, and then the actual mechanics of password reset.
Comments closedAaron Bertrand makes use of an ordering:
In my previous post, I showed how to borrow a snake draft concept from fantasy football, or a packing technique from the shipping industry, to distribute different portions of a workload to run in parallel. In the previous example, we determined a distribution order for databases based on size – though you can rank by literally any attribute (or combination of attributes). Once we’ve determined how to build out this order, we may want to store that data somewhere because, sometimes, the source of that data is not directly accessible.
Read on for tips on storing the results in a table, querying the results, and using them to drive SQL Agent jobs.
Comments closedReza Rad hogs the photocopier:
Microsoft Fabric offers an end-to-end SaaS analytics solution; however, the world is using all kinds of data sources in its implementation. Mirroring is a new functionality in Fabric that allows customers to keep their data wherever they are, but then they can use Fabric analytics solutions with the same speed and performance as if their data were in Fabric. Best of all, this won’t cost extra. If you wonder what it is and how it works, read this article.
Click through for the video and article.
Comments closedTeo Lachev shares some advice:
Alerting is an important monitoring task for any ETL process. Azure Data Factory can integrate with a generic Azure event framework (Azure Monitor) which makes it somewhat unintuitive for ETL monitoring. You can set up and change the alerts using the ADF Monitoring hub.
Read on for five pieces of advice, in particular, covering how to set up one of these alerts.
Comments closedDanaraj Ram Kumar breaks out the Python IDE:
There are several approaches to work with Microsoft Purview entities programmatically, especially when needing to perform bulk operations such as documenting a large number of tables and columns dynamically.
This article shows how to use the Python SDK for Purview to programmatically document Purview table columns in bulk – assuming there are many tables and columns that needed to be automatically documented based off a reference tables – as in this example, the data dictionary maintained in Excel.
On the other hand, Purview REST APIs can be used to natively work with the REST APIs whereas the Python SDK for Purview is a wrapper that makes it easier to programmatically interacts with the Purview Atlas REST APIs in the backend.
Click through for sample code and explanations.
Comments closed